I’m pleased to announce that I think the recent technical problems on the blog have been fixed.

The New Neo Posted on by

Rejoice!

On the other hand, what a ride.

When this problem began three days ago, I immediately called my hosting company (Bluehost), which has 24-hour support. That’s one of the things I like about Bluehost; you can actually speak to a real live person 24-hours a day, 7 days a week, and the hold time is usually very short. So far so good.

I told them it was probably some sort of cache problem on their end, but they initially denied it and insisted it was a code problem on my end and that I needed to hire a web developer to fix it. A search revealed that there are quite a few companies that offer themselves as troubleshooters for problems with WordPress blogs, and they charge varying fees for the service. But I couldn’t get any of these companies to get back to me. With one, for example, I kept opening tickets with questions, but I never heard a word back.

Meanwhile, I kept doing my own research as well as phoning Bluehost. This took an enormous amount of time, as you can imagine. I called Bluehost about seven times altogether, and talked for at least a half hour each time. But for those first five or so times (and this included each support person going to multiple supervisors for guidance) they insisted it was a code problem on my end, whereas I insisted it was a caching problem on their end. A frustrating standoff.

Well, to make a very long story shorter, some friends and bloggers kept telling me that it indeed was a cache problem, and they gave me enough details that I was finally able to convince the folks at Bluehost that it was a cache problem and that it was on their end. But now Bluehost was insisting (late last night) that I needed to upgrade to hosting on the cloud.

This morning I called again. This time I got a gentleman who said “Oh, I’ll clear the cache on our server.” And voila, problem solved…at least for now.

So I didn’t have to spend extra money getting someone to delve into my code and fix it. I didn’t have to upgrade and give Bluehost more money. Had I gotten someone knowledgeable there on the phone in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to spend three days working on this, nor would you have had to have the frustration (and fun?) of posting under identities other than your own when autofill decided to become a trickster. All of this was apparently due to a caching problem at the server, causing the cached versions to keep displaying rather than updating.

What did I learn from all of this? I learned that people can pay scads of money—up to $20,000 per month (and no, that’s not a typo)—for a dedicated server, if their traffic is high enough. I’ve learned that support staff don’t always have a clue what they’re doing (although I suppose I already knew that). I learned that these days we often get the semblance of support and competence—fancy advertising on websites, “tichets” that you open that promise immediate response but that are messages in a bottle that never reach shore—without the substance.

But most of all, at this moment I’m grateful that the problem seems to have been solved. I give a heartfelt thanks to that guy at Bluehost who knew what he was doing. And I hope the whole thing doesn’t happen again—but if it does, I know what a good provisional diagnosis would be, and I took notes so I can remember.

By the way, if there ever is a problem of a similar sort (and I hope there never is), I recommend that you either hit the CTRL + F5 keys simultaneously to see the latest version of the blog, or if that doesn’t work, add “?no-cache=1” (minus the quotation marks) after my blog URL neoneocon.com. You might want to note that down, as well as the address of my old blog if all else fails: http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com .

Boy, I hope this post shows up in a timely fashion. If not, it’s back to the drawing board.

Update, and another suggestion for getting the latest version of the blog (including comments)

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m almost 100% sure the blog glitch of the last few days is a cache problem, and that it originates at the host. But my host isn’t offering a solution at the moment, so I’m still waiting for the developer.

The fix is going more slowly than I was originally told it would. But I’m pretty sure I’m much closer to a short-term solution. The more long-term solution might involve a different host, which probably won’t be something you’ll notice on your end.

In the meantime, however, here’s a suggestion for a temporary way to overcome the problem. Instead of using neoneocon.com as the URL of the blog, use http://neoneocon.com/?no_cache=1 . Apparently, that’s a way to override the cached version of the blog and get the most recent version. Give it a try and let me know whether it works for you—that is, whether it displays new posts and new comments. If it does, use that URL until this problem gets fixed.

I think after it gets fixed, I’ll have someone do some sprucing up of the blog format. Again, I want to keep it mostly the way it is and have it be something you don’t notice all that much except that glitches will magically disappear, and the blog will load faster with easier-to-read columns.

That level of improvement will take a bit longer, of course. First things first, which is to fix the cache problem.

More about this tiresome blog glitch

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve discovered that if you force a cache refresh by pressing CTL + F5, you can usually make the blog display the comments and the posts properly. Let me know if you see the most recent posts when you do that.

Of course, one problem is that this post is now the most recent post. So some of you won’t be able to read it, if the blog isn’t refreshing properly for you. For that reason, I’m also placing this message in the comments of the last couple of posts, to maximize the number of people who’ll be able to read it.

All you competer experts or semi-experts out there, do you have any advice for fixing things, based on this new information? I’m still getting professionals to help, but they’re taking longer than I’d like.

Obama and the Iran deal, redux

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m surprised to see Politico publishing an investigative report that’s critical of Obama’s Iran deal (see also this). After all, Politico has usually been Obama- and Democrat-friendly.

But I suppose that article is in the nature of a “now it can be told” story. Now it can be told—because the damage is done, and Obama is earning his well-deserved rest from the cares of executive office, although the post of leader of the Democratic Party seems to be one he still holds.

The article by Josh Meyer details some of the hidden bargains Obama made in order to get Iranian compliance, or the appearance of Iranian compliance. The first issue involves the release of prisoners, which was presented as far less costly on our part than it actually was. For example (and this is just a small portion of the information Meyer uncovered):

And in a series of unpublicized court filings, the Justice Department dropped charges and international arrest warrants against 14 other men, all of them fugitives. The administration didn’t disclose their names or what they were accused of doing, noting only in an unattributed, 152-word statement about the swap that the U.S. “also removed any Interpol red notices and dismissed any charges against 14 Iranians for whom it was assessed that extradition requests were unlikely to be successful.”

Three of the fugitives allegedly sought to lease Boeing aircraft for an Iranian airline that authorities say had supported Hezbollah, the U.S.-designated terrorist organization. A fourth, Behrouz Dolatzadeh, was charged with conspiring to buy thousands of U.S.-made assault rifles and illegally import them into Iran.

A fifth, Amin Ravan, was charged with smuggling U.S. military antennas to Hong Kong and Singapore for use in Iran. U.S. authorities also believe he was part of a procurement network providing Iran with high-tech components for an especially deadly type of IED used by Shiite militias to kill hundreds of American troops in Iraq.

The biggest fish, though, was Seyed Abolfazl Shahab Jamili, who had been charged with being part of a conspiracy that from 2005 to 2012 procured thousands of parts with nuclear applications for Iran via China. That included hundreds of U.S.-made sensors for the uranium enrichment centrifuges in Iran whose progress had prompted the nuclear deal talks in the first place.

When federal prosecutors and agents learned the true extent of the releases, many were shocked and angry. Some had spent years, if not decades, working to penetrate the global proliferation networks that allowed Iranian arms traders both to obtain crucial materials for Tehran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs and, in some cases, to provide dangerous materials to other countries.

I certainly was unaware of these details. But none of it surprises me, and I bet that none of it surprises most of my readers.

There also is no reason to be surprised that the prisoner release was just the beginning of the betrayals:

Through action in some cases and inaction in others, the White House derailed its own much-touted National Counterproliferation Initiative at a time when it was making unprecedented headway in thwarting Iran’s proliferation networks. In addition, the POLITICO investigation found that Justice and State Department officials denied or delayed requests from prosecutors and agents to lure some key Iranian fugitives to friendly countries so they could be arrested. Similarly, Justice and State, at times in consultation with the White House, slowed down efforts to extradite some suspects already in custody overseas, according to current and former officials and others involved in the counterproliferation effort.

That series of actions started in the fall of 2014. To me, this has not only Obama’s fingerprints on it, but John Kerry’s prints as well. Say what you will about Hillary Clinton (and there’s plenty to say), I don’t think she would have been quite as willing and eager to sign off on this as Kerry, who was the perfect person to execute the plan. Kerry had become Secretary of State in February of 2013, and I believe he was instrumental in carrying out Obama’s wishes.

I haven’t yet had time to read the entire Politico piece; it’s long. But I plan to read the whole thing, and I suggest you do so, too.

[NOTE: Meyer has only been with Politico for a few months, but he’s been doing investigative reporting for many years, much of it with the LA Times. I don’t know his political persuasion (he has written mostly for liberal publications), but here’s his resume. It includes this:

Josh is currently the director of education and outreach of the Medill Journalism School National Security Journalism Initiative…At the Los Angeles Times, Meyer was a staff writer for 20 years, the last nine as its terrorism/national security reporter in Washington. He won or shared in numerous local, state and national awards at the paper, including two staff Pulitzer Prizes and also an Overseas Press Club award for his investigative reporting before 9/11 on Al Qaeda’s efforts to establish a covert U.S. presence and to launch attacks on U.S. soil.

Whatever his politics may be, Meyer’s immersion in national security matters indicates to me that his motivation to keep going with this piece was outrage at what happened at the hands of Obama and Kerry.]

[NOTE II: By the way, the networks don’t seem to be covering the story, at least up to the point this was written.]

The latest on the blog glitch

The New Neo Posted on by

[UPDATE 11:00 PM 4/26/3017

One hint:

I’ve discovered that if you force a cache refresh by pressing CTL + F5, you can usually make the blog display the comments and the posts properly. Let me know if you see the most recent posts when you do that.

All you computer experts or semi-experts out there, do you have any advice for fixing things, based on this new information? I’m still getting professionals to help, but they’re taking longer than I’d like.]

A bit of progress has been made. I’ve finally heard back from one of the many companies that specialize in troubleshooting WordPress problems, and they’re on the case. It may be a quick fix (I’m hoping so), or it may take a day or two.

In the meantime, keep checking your autofills, and realize that there can be a time lag before a post or a comment displays.

There may be an upside to all of this, which is that I may be able to get the fixers to improve the way the blog looks (wider columns, for example) and the speed at which it loads.

There’s a pony somewhere, if I just keep digging.

The art of the coloratura soprano

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Artfldgr”]

I’m not a big opera fan, although there are a couple of operas I love and with which I’m very familiar. But I have the deepest admiration for the skill and artistry of opera singers, who can do something that almost seems superhuman to me. I don’t sing very well, even in the pop sense, and although I can sort of carry a tune, the most you can say for my voice—as a voice teacher once told me—is that it’s “not unpleasant.” And he was trying to be nice.

So to me, opera singers do something unimaginable. The tones, the power, the projection! Plus the feeling and the acting. And then there are the languages.

Opera singers are usually not very young, because it takes quite a while to develop the entire package. But here’s a young lady of eighteen I find very impressive indeed. Wow, what a pure tone, what effortlessness combined with power (that’s the idea, right)?:

Even within the opera world, coloratura sopranos don’t tend to be my favorite type of singer—although again, my admiration for them knows no bounds. I seem to prefer a certain depth of tone, even in a soprano. Somehow, this type of soprano sounds almost freakish; otherwordly. But Janeckova’s voice is like velvet, and her highest notes show no strain that I can hear, unlike some of the others. If she sounds otherwordly, that other world would be the celestial one.

Here’s a wonderful video that is a compendium of many coloraturas of the past. Of all of them in this clip, I prefer Moffo:

Tariff on Canadian softwood lumber

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the latest salvo in a trade war, one that’s been going on for quite a while:

U.S. President Donald Trump intensified a trade dispute with Canada, slapping tariffs of up to 24 percent on imported softwood lumber in a move that drew swift criticism from the Canadian government, which vowed to sue if needed.

Trump announced the new tariff at a White House gathering of conservative journalists, shortly before the Commerce Department said it would impose countervailing duties ranging from 3 percent to 24.1 percent on Canadian lumber producers including West Fraser Timber Co.

“We’re going to be putting a 20 percent tax on softwood lumber coming in — tariff on softwood coming into the United States from Canada,” Trump said Monday, according to a tweet by Charlie Spiering, a White House correspondent for Breitbart News. A White House official confirmed the comment.

The step escalates an economic battle among neighboring countries that normally have one of the friendliest international relationships in the world. It follows a fight over a new Canadian milk policy that U.S. producers say violates the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“Canada has made business for our dairy farmers in Wisconsin and other border states very difficult. We will not stand for this. Watch!” Trump said in a tweet Tuesday morning.

This really is a longstanding issue:

Since the early 1980s, the U.S. has argued with Canada over how much softwood lumber the country’s suppliers can sell in the U.S. and at what price. The two nations have negotiated temporary agreements in previous years over softwood, which comes from trees that have cones, like pine or spruce, and is preferred by builders for constructing home frames.

But hammering out a new deal has been slow-going for the Trump administration, which still doesn’t have its chief trade negotiator in place.

“Hammering out a new deal”—nice metaphor for building with wood.

The appropriation of Anne Frank

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed this recent post by William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection entitled, “I warned you about the Anne Frank Center (US).” The subject is a group that appropriates Anne Frank’s name for political purposes:

It’s unlikely that until Trump’s election you heard of an entity calling itself the “Anne Frank Center (US).” That’s because for most of its history, AFCUS has quietly done work educating people about Anne Frank.

Then in the spring of 2016 everything changed. AFCUS changed its focus, hired a political activist named Steven Goldstein, and began to reposition itself as a social justice organization.

AFCUS has, since Trump’s election, issued a series of inflammatory statements that get gobbled up by the media looking to bash Trump.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least, because I had noticed a somewhat-related phenomenon recently; they’re not the only ones. Take a look at this article from the Times of Israel that describes the phenomenon I’m talking about:

After decades where she was largely thought of as the quintessential Jewish victim of the Holocaust, “in the past 20 years Anne Frank has come to symbolize the victim of all of the world’s evils,” said David Barnouw, author of the 2012 book “The Anne Frank Phenomenon.” Barnouw is a former researcher at the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

The debate on whether Frank’s story should be viewed and taught as a particular case of the genocide against the Jews or more generally as a story of a child victim of war is as old as the diary itself…

The creeping decontextualization of the Anne Frank story is the main theme of a 2014 Dutch documentary featuring interviews with dozens of the roughly 1 million people who each year stand in line for hours to enter the Anne Frank House ”” the Amsterdam museum that was set up at her family’s former hiding place.

In the film, titled “In Line for Anne,” an activist for African-American rights from Texas, Omowale Luthuli-Allen, compares Anne’s experience to that of blacks living under segregation.

“We’ve lived like that,” he says. “In a way we have lived Anne Frank’s life.”

Augustine Sosa, a gay man from Paraguay, says his “life is very similar to that of Anne Frank.”

The article goes on to describe similar reactions from other people, in which equivalences are made that are false equivalences, although by well-meaning people. But then there’s this sort of thing:

A more controversial case is the reproduction in Amsterdam of images of Anne Frank wearing a kaffiyeh, the checkered shawl favored by pro-Palestinian activists. Postcards and T-shirts bearing the image, which was first circulated on social networks and adopted by activists seeking a boycott on Israel, were sold for years despite protests by Dutch Jews who said it suggested an equivalence between Israel and Nazi Germany.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam also objected to the image because it is “deeply hurtful, even in 2016,” the institution’s director, Ronald Leopold, told JTA last year at a symposium about the iconization of Anne Frank. The conference, featuring prominent scholars, was an attempt to understand what Anne Frank will mean to future generations.

In 2006, the Arab European League, a radical Belgium-based Muslim rights group, posted on its website a caricature of Anne Frank in bed with Adolf Hitler. A Dutch appeals court in 2010 fined the organization for hate speech and ordered the offensive caricature removed, but it had spread on social media, where it circulates today.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. Decades ago, the Orwellian anti-Israel anti-Semitic Palestinian propaganda machine discovered the enormous advantages of comparing Israel to the Nazis and the Palestinians to the Jews during World War II, despite the fact that (among other things) the Palestinian Grand Mufti was an ally of Hitler:

In 1937, evading an arrest warrant, he fled Palestine and took refuge successively in the French Mandate of Lebanon and the Kingdom of Iraq, until he established himself in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. During World War II he collaborated with both Italy and Germany by making propagandistic radio broadcasts and by helping the Nazis recruit Bosnian Muslims for the Waffen-SS (on the ground that they shared four principles: family, order, the leader and faith). Also, as he told the recruits, Germany had not colonized any Arab country while Russia and England had.[15] On meeting Adolf Hitler he requested backing for Arab independence and support in opposing the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home. At the war’s end he came under French protection, and then sought refuge in Cairo to avoid prosecution for war crimes.

In the lead-up to the 1948 Palestine war, Husseini opposed both the 1947 UN Partition Plan and King Abdullah’s designs to annex the Arab part of British Mandatory Palestine to Jordan…

These days, though, when Israel isn’t being compared to apartheid-era South Africa, it’s being compared to Nazi Germany.

Has this sort of thing percolated down to the public in this country? You bet it has. Maybe not the full “Israel is the Nazi, and the Arab world are the Jews during WWII” except on the far left. But a slightly-weakened version seems to be mainstream among many liberals.

I base that on my recent observation of a group of several hundred people who were part of a discussion in which the topic of Anne Frank and her diary came up. Several speakers indicated that the diary was now “more topical than ever,” and each one explicitly mentioned that it was because of “what was happening to the Arabs and Muslims” at the hands of Trump and anyone who had any problem with letting unlimited numbers into this country or Europe.

That seemed to be the consensus opinion in the audience, as far as I could tell. And it’s the sort of thing I’ve heard over and over again. The fact that Muslims have many Muslim countries the world over to which they can emigrate, and have no particularly pressing need to come here, is ignored. The fact that there is no aggressive power (such as Nazi Germany in WWII) that is hunting down Muslims and aiming to kill them is ignored. The fact that Muslims live peacefully in Israel is ignored. The fact that it is the Muslim world that is driving some of the most vicious anti-Semitism today is ignored.

Update on the blog glitch

The New Neo Posted on by

In trying to deal with their trickster blog glitch that’s been switching identifies on commenters, I’ve been burning the midnight oil and talking on the phone with several people. Most of them are techies at my host, but one of them is the person who helped me set up the blog and who has fine-tuned it over the years.

No one seems to have a clue why my blog has decided to turn into a joker, or how to fix it, although several things have been tried. The consensus is that it’s not a purposeful hack and that it’s some code problem that may have been triggered by an update to a new WordPress version. The next step is to hire one of these troubleshooters who specialize in this sort of thing.

The good news is that they swear they can fix just about anything, and do it fast. The bad news is that “fast” still may take a day or two.

In the meantime, please check the comment autofill to see that it’s not filling in someone else’s information. And when you fill in your own information, if you have an email address that you don’t want to show up on another commenter’s computer, don’t use it in your comments here. You can use a fake email address, if you wish. Some of you may also notice time lags in displaying comments or in displaying posts.

In addition, if the blog goes down for a while and you want information, you can always go to my old blog site. Note the address of that blog.

I hope that this will be fixed very soon. I apologize for the annoyance. This sort of thing happens now and then to every blog, but that doesn’t make it fun.

Blog glitch

The New Neo Posted on by

Some people are experiencing a glitch in the autofill for the comments, a very odd one: the autofill is filling in other commenters’ information.

If you want to keep your email addresses secret until this glitch clears up, just put in a fake email for the duration. You will still be able to comment.

I have no idea why this is happening, but I will look into it. It seems to be somewhat related to a glitch of several months ago, where comments weren’t showing. That happened to me once today as well, and my newer posts haven’t show up right away either.

My apologies for the inconvenience. I will be working on fixing it ASAP. It’s very frustrating to me, too. If the blog goes down for any amount of time, go to my old site for further information and postings. Note that URL down if you don’t already have it: http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com .

How can a person defend against sexual harassment charges?

The New Neo Posted on by

In the comments to the Bill O’Reilly post there was a discussion of whether sexual harassment lawsuits are often settled for big bucks even though the accused might be innocent. After all, why not fight the charges? Settling isn’t legally an admission of guilt, but it can be taken for such an admission, so why do it?

I mentioned that it’s sometimes easier, cheaper, and less damaging to the reputation to settle than to fight. In a court battle, the charges are fully aired and can gain even greater publicity, and legal defenses are both expensive and time-consuming. But another issue that I didn’t mention in the O’Reilly discussion was the difficulty of mounting a defense in a “he-said/she said” dispute.

It’s only in rare cases that either party has a recording of the event. It’s only rarely that there’s any record of the interactions in question, or witnesses to them. Also, what we sometimes see is a situation in which other women (it’s usually women accusing a man) come out of the woodwork to make similar accusations and mount similar lawsuits (or join in a group action). Are the later women telling the truth, emboldened by knowing there are others? Or are they simply jumping on the money-wagon? We don’t know, and we usually never know. In the court of public opinion, it often comes down to whether you tend to believe these stories or not, in general.

But what about the court of law? Sexual harassment is a civil rather than a criminal act, which means that the standard of proof is not reasonable doubt but a preponderance of the evidence. Take a look at the basic law about what constitutes sexual harassment, and you’ll see how broadly it is defined:

Sexual harassment at work is defined as:

unwelcome conduct
of a sexual nature or directed toward the victim’s gender
that creates a hostile or offensive work environment and/or
includes an adverse job action against the victim.

It’s that last bit that seems to afford some protection for the accused against frivolous or fabricated suits. If there’s no adverse action, then the plaintiff can’t win, right? Problem is that an incident of harassment can be fabricated out of revenge, ex post facto, by someone who has experienced an adverse job action that occurs for other reasons. For example, a person fails to be promoted, and the company or the boss says it’s for reason A, but the person says it’s because the boss had made advances that the person had refused. Who’s to know which it is?

Here’s a jaw-dropper:

Consent is not necessarily a defense to sexual harassment, as it may be for sexual assault. Given the power dynamics that often operate between victim and harasser, a victim may not resist or may even consent to sexual conduct out of fear of job loss or other repercussions if he or she objects. In recognition of this reality, sexual harassment may occur even if a victim consents.

I’m not trying to say that most harassment charges are fabricated. I’m assuming that many are very real, although I have no idea what percentage of the whole they represent. But there’s no question that these laws create a huge opening for fabrications, and that once such charges are made they could be difficult even for the innocent to defend against.